A few months back I came across Matt Cuttss’ video(embedded below) on canonicalization of URLs. Till then, I didn’t know that technically, www.example.com, example.com, www.example.com/, example.com/ are different and you could serve different content for these URL’s.
A good to know thing for me and I left it at that.
Completely unrelated, a few weeks back, we were launching a site. The registration page was very critical to the entire site and for some reason, when I submitted the registration page, it sort of went into a limbo and didn’t load the registration thank you page. The IT folks in office couldn’t resolve the issue and said that it was a problem with my computer. We again left it at that and went on to launch the site.
Yesterday, some one reported the same problem and we went into serious investigation on the issue. It was then that I realized that the registration confirmation page went into a loop if I accessed the site as http://xxxxxxxxx.in vs the usual http://www.xxxxxxxxx.in . The entire site was one huge flash file and was loading information from some static text files and the text file path was referenced as http://www.xxxxxxxxx.in/sometext.txt .It naturally couldn’t be returned and the registration page hung!
We finally solved it with a 301 redirect on IIS that was serving the website. Problem solved!
You can read about other ways to do a 301 redirect here.
